The Space of Disappearance

"More than 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976-83, leaving behind a cultural landscape fractured by absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge. This book is about how these absences assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors have crafted to respond to the country's use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. In incisive close readings of texts by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop looks at how techniques of dissimulation, doubling, displacement, suspension, and embodiment come to serve both epistemological and ethical functions, grounding new forms of historical knowledge and a new narrative commons whose work continues into the new millennium. Their writing, Bishop argues, recalibrates our understanding of the reciprocity between fiction and history. In the end, The Space of Disappearance asks us to look again at what we think we cannot see. For there, in fiction, at the limits of the literary, disappearance appears as a vital agent of resistance, storytelling, and worldbuilding"--